Facebook Deletes Music Piracy Groups Following Complaints

Back in the early days of the internet, users would post links to pirated content on dedicated file-sharing sites. But that trend has died down significantly over the past several years in favor of social media and sites like Reddit. Facebook is one of the sites that has been under pressure from the entertainment industry about taking action against piracy, and they are complying. According to anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the company responded by deleting nine "pirate" groups complained about by the entertainment industry. TorrentFreak reports: "Links to infringing files hosted on cloud services were indexed on the pages. Knowingly posting links to infringing files is itself a violation," BREIN says. After being contacted by BREIN, Facebook responded by deleting all nine 'pirate' groups. However, this wasn't the first time the social network has taken this kind of action. BREIN says that earlier this year Facebook removed a number of similar groups following complaints of infringement. But while shutting down 'pirate' groups will have some short-term effect, the people that were participating in them are likely to regroup and set up elsewhere. Of course, BREIN can follow them to their new homes but it's also aware of the value of targeting individuals. "The posters of the infringing links are also often the illegal uploader of unauthorized files [on cyberlocker sites]," BREIN says, adding that in some circumstances it will seek to hold those people responsible for their actions.

Re:

[lxs]

They are not the fucking Illuminati.They are just a bunch of sad shits who are shunned at family gatherings.
Don't attribute powers to them that they don't have.

That sure showed them

[Dunbal]

Take that! No more internet for you! Wait what?

Test

[CanadianMacFan]

It would be interesting to test what BREIN is doing. Are they just looking at link names or are they actually running the files through a checker. I wonder what would happen if someone put up a list of links that weren't valid but had valid song names, with the artist name in it too, in a made up piracy group. Have the host of the links be 127.0.0.1. If it does get deleted then see what Facebook says and go public.

Meanwhile ...

[troll -1]

The best links are hosted by google. Try searching star trek beyond filetype:torrent for example.

Re:

[MightyYar]

Don't forget to scroll to the bottom and open up the Lumen complaints! Those have some really nice juicy links, pre-vetted by the copyright holders.

Re:

[MightyYar]

It's mixed with all of the links that were reported at one time. Chances are pretty good that there were Star Trek links in the same document.

Back in the day we use to run PWS

[future assassin]

and ftp servers on 14.4 modems and we liked. We also used a file splitter and would carry around large downloads on tens of floppies then splice them back together. Oh did I mention IRC?

Re:

[SeaFox]

Oh did I mention IRC?

XDCC bots are still there and work great.

Definitions differ

[jrumney]

Back in the early days of the internet, users would post links to pirated content on dedicated file-sharing sites.

I'm not sure what the disconnect is, but the submitter seems to be using different definitions of some words than I am used to.

Is alt.binaries.warez a dedicated file-sharing site? Or is 2000 (when the first filelocker sites started appearing) considered the early days of the internet?

Censorship

[uncoveror]

Locking up ideas as property is no less a form of censorship than trying to suppress them, and shutting down groups chatting about file sharing is suppression of ideas. Copyright is an idea whose time has passed. They will just find another place to meet online beside Facebook, which no one should be using anyway. It exists solely to datamine people and sell info to advertisers.